Category Archives: Administrative

I should’ve hyped this at least a week ago on this blog, but since I didn’t a) I’ll hype it now and b) this will serve as a dumping ground for ALL of the things I’m giving away tomorrow. There are so many. I will update this as games, skins, and keys are claimed.

I’m streaming at twitch.tv/littlesisgaming for 24 hours starting noon MT 11/21/2015 and giving away ALL THIS STUFF! For donations to my Extra Life page, of course 🙂 Deets found under the “How do I get this stuff” heading!

Smite Giveaways

Paladins Giveaways

How do I get this awesome stuff!?

Donate any amount to my Extra Life page and be sure to say what game/skin you would prefer to get. Want more than one entry? Donate more than once! Want to be in the running for more than 1 game/skin? Donate more than once and write different donation messages! Supa easy.

I’ll put it in a spreadsheet and every so often, use a random number generator to pick a row and get that person their game or skin!

To get the Humble Bundle 4, donate $10+ and say “Humble Bundle 4” in your donation message to be in the running! I can’t split up the bundle so it’s all or nothin’, baby!

Stream Perks for Donations

Donate $15 or more to my Extra Life fundraising page and you can choose what game I play on stream for at least an hour! Check out all my games here (be sure to click Platform and sort by PC – can’t play console games on stream at the moment). I will also snag NES or SNES ROMs if you donate and want me to play anything retro 🙂

Earlier this year, game developer Konami announced that it was shifting its focus. Instead of relying on its top-tier console titles, the company is adapting some of its more popular franchises to the casual casino-gaming and mobile free-to-play school of gaming. The move, while upsetting for some, comes as little surprise. The company had been seeing declining profits in its console gaming division for years despite big name titles like the Metal Gear Solid series.

According to Digital Trends, the first two titles the company is introducing to casinos and pachinko parlors in Japan are the survival-horror franchise Silent Hill and the vampire-slaying platformer series Castlevania. For some gamers, these announcements feel like a slap in the face. Many were looking forward to a now-shelved console sequel to Silent Hill developed in collaboration with Pan’s Labyrinth and Pacific Rim director Guillermo del Toro.

The low overhead and high return-on-investment from mobile and casino gaming has many companies traditionally known for their console titles looking to move their business to the “freemium” based model sustained by micro-transactions. And Konami isn’t done with just two titles as it’ll showcase many more of its casino offerings at the Global Gaming Expo this fall. CNN reports that the classic highway-hopping game, Frogger, will make its way to the casino floor. The press release also hints that even more classic properties, including Contra and Dungeons & Dragons, will be unveiled.

“Players have the chance to experience their favorite Frogger features with a real-money casino spin,” said Matt Reback, vice president of marketing at Konami Gaming, Inc. “While the primary game carries modernized character art paired alongside our proven video slot features and math, the game’s mystery Frogger Bonus allows players to relive the classic road and river crossing course in retro-pixelated glory.

The conference will take place at the Sands Expo and Convention Center adjacent to the Venetian Palazzo and is expected to bring more than 25,000 industry professionals to Las Vegas. “Visitors to this year’s G2E will have no doubt about Konami’s unique role in the industry,” said Reback. “We’re leveraging our company’s gaming entertainment legacy, backed by an operational stability and dedication to product quality that engenders confidence in the global gaming market.” The expo takes place from Sept. 29 through Oct. 1.

This news comes hot on the heels of a movement for new regulations to allow traditional skill-based video games to operate alongside the usual games of chance, such as slot machines. CBS Local reports that the proposed requirements for skill-based games would include providing detailed game rules in advance as well as informing players of potential outcomes.

If the latest regulations go through and Konami’s new gamble pays off, you can definitely expect to see more of your favorite titles in the gambling realm. It’s not that far of stretch to even imagine Nintendo trying to take advantage of this lucrative new market.

Written by Blaine Kelton, who can be reached at BLKelton [at] outlook [dot] com. Blaine is a freelance writer with an interest in mobile gaming currently focusing on portability as it relates to control schemes and the remastering of 8- and 16-bit art styles.

One week down! And in a week of streaming, I’ve had an amazing blast (albeit not the most consistent schedule but it’ll get better) and I’m just looking to move onward and upward!

The first improvement idea I’ve had bouncing around my brain is doing some older games, not just because they’re most easily accessible but also because I love the ones I’ve already played and there are some old ones I never finished playing (for shame). So here’s where the brain trust (you guys) come in: is a stream day dedicated to Flashback Friday/Throwback Thursday too hackneyed? Do you imagine people would be okay with getting through an old game only one day a week at a time? Does that sound like something you guys would be interested in? Fill out the poll and let me know!

If you have ideas, more thoughts, or more suggestions on stream improvements, I’m BEGGING you to leave a comment or tweet at me or email me! Thanks, friends!

The past two weeks have been kind of amazing. I wrapped up my semester, I got all of my new hardware to build my new AMD PC, the motherboard and/or CPU pooped out on me, so I replaced the motherboard, got the second one yesterday, and it also didn’t work, so it might be both again, or maybe it’s been the CPU the whole time? I dunno but what a whirlwind big city adventure (read: highly annoying and I’ve wanted to pull out my hair everyday and I might have actually shed a tear or three yesterday because I was so. damn. frustrated). But I channeled one of my favorite adages – done is better than perfect.

So instead of waiting for replacement parts, we’re running with Twitch TODAY! On my laptop. Which is super beefy, to it’s credit, but you know – smaller monitor, OBS has problems recording the monitor which is poopy for PC games, etc. etc. BUT WE’RE DOING IT ANYWAY! Done is better than perfect. And to be clear, I worked out OBS so the recording will be great.

Today I’ll be going live with Middle-Earth: Shadows of Mordor around 3pm Mountain Time (which is also 2pm Pacific Time if that helps anyone). In the future, I plan to stream for about 3 to 4 hours, but today I have a DND campaign to get to at 6pm so I’ll be cutting it around 5:30pm. AND this will all be on twitch.tv/littlesisgaming (different from where I streamed all my Extra Life stuff last year so take note). Can you believe the full sister URL/username was taken? Boo.

My schedule moving forward is Tuesday through Saturday, 3pm (Mountain Time) to whenever I feel like stopping, but most likely for at least 4 hours. And that’s Twitch! The lighting it subpar, the mic is good enough, and the setup on my end is a hodgepodge of cords and balancing monitors on books and speakers, but IT WORKS! And done is better than perfect.

So my last post was super anti-climatic because I was building my new desktop and was going to start streaming and blogging and being a general badass all summer, and while that is STILL the plan, it’s all been put on hold due to a poopy motherboard. Motherboards, amirite? Sigh. But in the interlude of the replacement being shipped to my apartment, I thought I’d wax eloquent for a minute about why I’ve been MIA for the past 8 to 9 months, and what I’ve been doing.

I posted a while back that my new blogging spot on the ‘net would be at my school-mandated, development blog. Turns out most of that was unintelligible fluff, because it was an assignment, and I didn’t put any effort into it towards the last half of my first semester, and onwards, AND the faculty read it so it has to be pretty vanilla. Not that if I was really burning to say something snarky that would’ve stopped me but it just made it easier to post things like “Boy, what a great week of development on our prototype! We hit some roadblocks, but worked together as a team and overcame that hurdle!” *yawn*

I tweeted a week or two ago the following sentiments (PS I’m back on dat Twitter game FUH REAL) but I’ll expound here: loving video games is not a good indicator of your skill at designing video games. Far and away, the program I’m in pushes really hard for every student to internalize good game design principles. The past few days I was reading a book that my therapist recommended to me that has a lot of information I’m not sure I agree with or not but it did talk a lot about finding what you really want to do, no matter how silly it sounds. It made me think back to a year and a half ago when I applied to this program; did I really want to design games? Or did I just want to be more a part of a medium I love? I ask that but I suppose I already know – no, I didn’t want to design games. I didn’t really think about it, might be a more fair deduction. I saw a program about video games and thought YEAH! Video games! Which is kind of a terrible reason to be so far into school debt, but here I am, so where do I go?

In addition to realizing that designing video games is not high on my life goals list, I also have come up empty on the real employment side of things for the summer. I applied to over 60 internships and real jobs, not just in games but everywhere in tech, and had no luck. 3 interviews, and actually one offer for an internship but it would’ve required me to live in NYC poverty so I had to turn it down. To take a small tangent – while I was trying to decide if I should take the NYC opportunity, I talked to a friend who currently lives in NYC and even though my professors were talking me down from accepting, she was very gently trying to get me to take it. She brought up points like “Do you want to be in NYC permanently? Like is this a stepping stone to being here full-time after you graduate?” and I didn’t know and hemmed and hawed, and thought about her experience which was graduating in Seattle with a fashion degree, moving her whole life in a suitcase to live on a floor while she worked retail in NYC just to be in NYC, to make opportunities happen, and now she’s designing at Ralph Lauren. RIGHT!? I MEAN, COME ON!

After I made the decision to turn down the internship, I felt pretty shitty. After contemplation the past two days, I think what I’m realizing is that I just didn’t want to do that work. If I really wanted to be there, that was an amazing shot and I would’ve taken it. But I didn’t want to be. Which might sound crazy to some of you guys. Which I understand. But getting back to my tweets of insight (personal insight, anyway) there’s a chasm of difference between making a living making video games, and making a living consuming video games. And maybe it makes me sound like a lazy, generation XYwhatever entitled asshole, but I’d much rather make a living consuming video games.

So while I’m unemployed this summer, I figured now was as good a time as any to get my Twitch game off the ground. Talk about making money for consuming games, amirite? I also really want to build this brand, LSG. I really do love it, I really do love the WordPress community I became a part of while I was giving this time and attention and energy, and I have also admitted to myself that no matter how much I might love past supervisors, working for a company is just the pits. So much bureaucracy. And so much putting on pants and being somewhere by 8 am. This summer is the proof that I can make money on the internet and support myself. So Twitch is on my to-do, writing here more is on my to-do list, and podcasting of some kind if on my to-do list because it’s just fun. It’s just so much damn fun, you know? You guys know.

So hello again, my old friends. Ya’ll are magical human beings, ya’ll are badasses. I’ll be seeing you around the internet.

Subject meaning, until the next time I post on this site, you should check for actual, regularly blog posts (whaaa-!?) on a blog I’m academically obligated to create for a rapid prototyping class.

That’s right folks; the few short months between my “announcement” post that I was applying to a game production program at the University of Utah and now have flown by and I’m in the thick of my first week in a mind-numbingly busy program. One class is building a new game prototype every 4 weeks. One requirement of that class is blogging often about what we’re learning and doing. So if a professor recommends I blog twice a week about a class, ya better believe I’m gonna do it. Slightly better impetus to write on that blog, than on this one.

Having said that, I love you all dearly so if you’d like to check it out, the URL is http://blogs.eae.utah.edu/lbanks/.

It’ll be interesting trying to write more from an industry perspective, and less from a consumer perspective. I hope to see you all along for the ride!